Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is very damaging about it? Beyond facilitating A/B/O fan fiction, of course.
That people (usually males) believe this fanfiction also applies to human society and change their behaviours to be perceived as alpha
If anything, I would conjecture that the causality is actually in reverse: the ideas of pecking orders and dominance hierarchies were well-established in the scientific communities among zoologists and social psychologists (and even in common parlance), so people who studied wolves didn’t question external validity of their studies on captive wolves.